A Delicately Managed Face-Lift for a Paris Beauty

The red awnings and scarlet geraniums have returned to the newly buffed Art Nouveau balconies of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, whose facade on chic Avenue Montaigne had for months resembled a construction zone.

And then it didn’t. After a 200-million-euro ($268 million) expansion and renovation, this marquee property of the Dorchester Collection reopened this month in what was being billed as a soft launch but seemed a little more substantial.

“All of the available rooms were full the first night, the bar was full,” said François Delahaye, the general manager of the Plaza Athénée and the chief operating officer of the Dorchester Collection. “We served 486 meals from room service. Of course we were prepared, but it was a little unexpected.”

The ceiling of the hotel's Le Bar is done in waves and folds of fabric.CreditLauren Fleishman for The New York Times

The hotel’s upgrade comes at a time of rebirth in the luxury hotel sector in Paris: The refurbished Ritz Paris, famed for its Bar Hemingway, is set to reopen next year on Place Vendôme; a renovated Hôtel de Crillon in Place de la Concorde is also due to reopen next year; and the Peninsula Paris near the Arc de Triomphe opened its doors the same weekend as the updated Plaza Athénée.

But the 101-year-old Plaza Athénée occupies a special place in Parisian hotel history. A dining area served as a cafeteria for American soldiers during the Liberation, and it became the hotel of preference of Rudolph Valentino and later Christian Dior, who loved the area so much that he located his boutique there. It still has the cachet of a stately hotel. During its reopening, the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, who also holds the tourism portfolio, was on hand.

Still, under Mr. Delahaye, a former butler to the Duke of Westminster who was named manager of the year by the industry group European Hotel Managers Association last year, the hotel could not afford to rest on its laurels.

By integrating with three buildings that surround the hotel, including two hôtels particuliers, or luxury townhouses, one of which will still house the jeweler Harry Winston, Mr. Delahaye was able to add 14 guest rooms and three event spaces, including a modest but sumptuous ballroom that will seat 170.

In an attempt to attract a younger, well-heeled crowd without alienating wealthy loyal customers, the renovation consisted of updating the street-level cocktail lounge, Le Bar, and Alain Ducasse’s on-site restaurant, retaining a classic French interior design in guest suites and using lighting to make the public spaces feel brighter.

With its proximity to the haute houses like Dior, the hotel seems inspired by couture itself in its renovation, right down to the installation on the ceiling of Le Bar: waves and folds of fabric in an intense International Klein Blue, named for the French postwar artist Yves Klein, who often used it in his works.

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A room in the Royal Suite at the hotel.CreditLauren Fleishman for The New York Times

The restaurant, Alain Ducasse au Plaza Athénée, will reopen next month with two personalities — bright for day and glowingly warm for evening — with a fish- and vegetable-based menu. The Paris-based designers Jouin-Manku have done away with voluminous coverings for the solid oak tabletops and added sofa-style seating in silvery space-age pods.

The lobby has new Carrara marble on the floor, new lighting on the ceiling and fewer light-blocking curtains. The manager said he hoped the changes would be so subtle that regulars wouldn’t realize all that was different.

“We didn’t want to do a ‘wow’ kind of renovation,” he said. “We wanted to keep our soul.”

And that French touch. Customers will still have rooms decorated in taffetas, velvets and bits of gold embroidery. But now there will be more fuchsia, orange and gray in the color scheme, along with Italian-made Beltrami 300-thread-count satiny cotton sheets and towels of fine Mako Egyptian cotton.

“In the past, we had six rooms with a direct Eiffel Tower view,” Mr. Delahaye said. “Now we will have 15. There will also be 40 to 50 rooms with views of the tower from their balconies.”

Suite 745, a three-bedroom affair with terrace on the hotel’s Art Deco seventh floor, still offers a view of the Eiffel Tower from each room, including the bathroom. All of this doesn’t come cheaply.

According to the Plaza Athénée reservation site, the nightly rate including taxes and fees in August starts at 695 euros, or about $920 at $1.32 to the euro, for a standard single of 270 square feet with a queen bed and a “quiet inner courtyard view.” A one-bedroom 1,180-square-foot “presidential suite” was 5,495 euros. Suite 745, Mr. Delahaye said, was 7,500 euros a night.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page TR11 of the New York edition with the headline: An Ambitious but Subtle Face-Lift for a French Beauty. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe